The idea that there is some Real Marilyn — some living, breathing person hiding within the iconography — has been reliably deployed since Monroe’s own heyday. Indeed, it was a magician’s trick used in her first interview with Life magazine, published in 1952 a pivotal year in her career.

Monroe was at this point an emerging star, widely admired for her roles in All About Eve (1950) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). However, her fledgling career had been nearly derailed by the revelations that she had posed for nude photos in her former life as a model; the photographer Tom Kelley had flogged the images to a calendar for a quick buck without her agreement. So the 20th Century Fox executives decided on a radical PR strategy: Marilyn would admit the whole affair, saying she needed the money to pay rent.

On the magazine’s cover — the first of six in a 10-year span — Marilyn backs up against the wall, eyes nearly shut, lips parted; she looks like you’re about to drunkenly kiss her at a party, like she’s not realized her ruched top is slipping down her shoulders. The promise is the same as in modern-day celebrity content: revelation, exposure, intimacy.

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In the interview itself, Marilyn is scolded for having “posed for calendar art when she was broke”. By way of illustration, the article reproduces the nude in full color. The captions contain an in-joke: above the nude is a black-and-white image of “Marilyn clothed”; “her taste in music is distinctly highbrow”, the copy snorts. Below, a big black arrow points to “Marilyn unclothed”. Not so highbrow then, were you Miss Mortenson? The reader is satisfied. They get to be titillated by the nudes; they also maintain their moral high ground; and they get to laugh at Monroe’s pretensions. They’ve got an eyeful of the Real Marilyn, in spite of all her airs and graces. Meanwhile, Monroe has swerved the scandal and saved her career. The interview was also the source of her best-known quip, a gag about wearing only Chanel No 5 to bed.

So this “sturdy blonde named Marilyn Monroe”, as the Life profile calls her, was already mastering a public-private Dance of the Seven Veils, a sort of PR striptease which is by now baked into the grammar of female celebrity. Her publicity coup was no doubt familiar to Kris Jenner, the momager of Kim Kardashian, who was alleged to have leaked her own daughter’s sex tape; half a century later, in 2007, the effect was precisely the same. But latter-day celebrities are Marilyn’s heirs, whether explicitly or not. In 2022 Kardashian wore Monroe’s “Happy birthday, Mr President” dress to the Met Gala, the subject of much indignation from Marilyn-watchers. In 1985, Madonna channeled the Monroe of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in her Material Girl music video; later she would adopt a punkier version of Monroe’s peroxide crop. Both women were the subject of erotic taboo, closely watched by the press in every romantic clinch — often in a way that overshadowed their work. Madonna said of Monroe that she “became an adjective”; as such her persona could be put on and taken off, a shibboleth for “Hollywood”, “sexiness”, or “blonde”.

These same signals are used today by Sabrina Carpenter, who winks at the Fifties as another blonde, corseted coquette. Carpenter has built a brand on the kind of breathy euphemism that made Marilyn so irresistible; the difference is that today, we credit celebrities like her with being in on the joke. On film and in the media, Marilyn often seemed to be surprised by her own outrageous sex appeal; in reality it was carefully curated and her apparent unworldliness was just as much of a construct. But then, the whole business of celebrity was far less complicated in the Fifties. Public personas could be utterly managed and exposure was mediated through agents. In the age of social media, celebrities cannot be as perfect as Marilyn: they are overexposed and multidimensional; they are real. After #MeToo, we are more comfortable with stars who appear to “own” their sexiness; Marilyn’s status as object rather than subject makes us uneasy.

What does it mean to know her, then? For Andy Warhol, Monroe was all surface, all abstraction. This was his contention when he copied a promotional image of Monroe from the 1953 film Niagara dozens of times via silkscreen; he began this series immediately after her death in August 1962. Marilyn’s image was seen spiraling into chaotic replication; the garish Marilyns parodied her virality by making her seem to metastasize, over and over, in freakish copies. The pictures became self-propelling objects. This is not a woman but a meme, Warhol is saying, and the only way we can see her is through the process of imitation.

Marilyn has proved an irresistible subject for writers, too — in the years after her death, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, everybody worth their salt had a piece of Marilyn. She was pitched as the ultimate postmodern quandary, or as a case study in sexist scopophilia; framed as a dejected victim of men or a winking puppetmaster in her own defilement. Each writer draws out of Marilyn a sweeping theory about mass media, or feminism, or sex, often taking these readings to onanistic excess. Sarah Churchwell knocked the wind out of the often-nonsense biographies in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004), most of them amounting to precisely the sort of pseudointellectualism Marilyn herself was mocked for during her Actor’s Studio era, or when she claimed to enjoy Dostoevsky. Nevertheless, more than 20 years after Churchwell put all this to bed, the Real Marilyns keep coming. Sometimes the revenants come in the form of literary figments, and sometimes real people — Jasmine Chiswell, or “the TikTok Marilyn Monroe“, makes a living out of impersonating her; she lives in Marilyn’s former home in Burbank, twirling and pouting and selling beauty products. The house is haunted, she says, by Marilyn’s ghost; the real ghoul is closer to home.

The obsession with the “realness” of Marilyn Monroe is always voyeuristic. It always involves prurient study of her marriages; of sex and rape; of the Hollywood casting couch which by all accounts was her means of introduction to studio life. She once said she didn’t “want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiacal”. So you can only imagine how she’d feel about this posthumous literary meta-eroticization. Her body has continued to be mined for tantalizing lumps of “real” ever since her death.

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The specific weirdness of Marilyn Monroe is her fame’s incomparable afterlife. Even as more and more people claim to find the Real Her, the memory of the woman has faded. I’d bet that most Zoomers don’t know what Monroe’s voice sounded like. I wonder how many have even seen Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year Itch. The oddity is that the search for the “real” Marilyn only intensifies as the real Marilyn recedes.

The hunt for the real Marilyn Monroe is part prurience, part catharsis. She is a pseudo-religious icon of a Hollywood heyday; but her status as icon jars with the vulnerable, ordinary, troubled woman who must have lived beneath. Her young, lonely death at 36 from barbiturate poisoning at the age of makes us uncomfortable; her secret pain, the miscarriages and violations, her asylum-bound mother and runaway father all leave a gauzy guilt over her pristine image. But if we don’t see her as real, this protects us from this guilt. In this sense she is more Anne Boleyn than Lady Diana, a historical curiosity rather than a woman in our time. Every biopic, every book, every exhibition is a failed excavation attempt — be under no delusions about that. The search is endless because Marilyn’s image was designed for endless reproduction.

As such, she slips through our fingers. Are we even sure there is a real woman beneath the white gown, beauty spot and fluttering eyes? This too-famous figure squats awkwardly between person and symbol, a category error. Every new attempt to pin her down peels back another layer; every new attempt merely produces a different copy. Really, all these retrospectives are a sort of land-grab: everyone wants Real Marilyn for himself.

Northie, the daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, is Gen Alpha’s Adrian Mole. Her debut album — N0rth4evr, released on Friday — is a catalog of the grandiose woes of phase-stricken tweens, recognizable to all former miniature diarists. Powered by the sounds and styles of metal and K-pop, North sings about the ennui of her mega-famous upbringing. In case you didn’t know, it can get lonely “in the back of the Lamb”; in fact, “all this money turn my heart into a black hole”. She rises to these challenges with her father’s hustler braggadocio: “I ain’t steppin’ out unless somebody pay me.” Presumably this pocket money is going towards indulgences more extravagant than Claire’s clip-on earrings and fruity Maybelline lipgloss, but ultimately North is still, if you needed reminding, only 12.

Mademoiselle West’s charmed childhood has been an internet obsession since she was delivered to the strains of Bohemian Rhapsody in West Hollywood in 2013 (Kanye was doing some delivery-room DJing, perhaps the most compelling incident in a crowded field for which he deserved punching). North was described as the world’s most famous baby, a crown shared with our very own Prince George; like a true royal, she was baptized in a cathedral during a tour of Jerusalem. From there, the marketing ramped up: who can forget her musical debut at the age of six at Paris Fashion Week, during which the puffa-coated rap progeny yelled into a mic at a heroically straight-faced row of models: “What are those? These are clothes. What are those? These are clothes.” Ye grinned on stage at his mini-me; Kim wept in the front row. Since then she has starred in The Lion King, collaborated with FKA Twigs and performed two songs at the 70,000-seater SoFi stadium during Kanye’s comeback show in LA last month. And, of course, she’s now released an album.

All the while, like every boundary-prodding preteen, North has been shocking curtain-twitchers with her “too grown-up” look. Black grills on her teeth, long blue wigs, finger piercings, full-beat makeup. Like Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter, 14-year-old Blue Ivy, North has been the focus of much hand-wringing and finger-wagging about the provocative styling of child celebrities. West, never one to pass up an opportunity to swipe at his ex-wife, is thought to have accused Kim of crossing “the line” in allowing North’s at-times eyebrow-raising outfits; a source said he thought his daughter was “way too young to be parading around like this” (on that occasion, in a corset), with threats of “rais[ing] hell with the lawyers”. This, supposedly, from a man who appears to encourage his wife Bianca Censori to go to events in the nude.

But observers who fret about North’s breakneck-speed entry into adulthood, littering comment sections with refrains such as “how about go be a kid” and “this is just sad”, are missing the point. North is precocious in the way only nepo babies can be; opportunities to dance on stage in Rick Owens boots are not forthcoming to most anonymous preteens. Her polished public image and drastic overexposure is the result of inconceivable fame — with its attendant stylists and agents and fixers. But she is also in many ways typical of her age group: her ultra-public childhood has millions of analogs the world over. Online pre-adolescence today is by definition grotesquely stage-managed, publicized, even monetized — and mostly by children themselves. Even those from more conventional homes than North West are fashioning their own digital cults of personalities, with their own curated TikTok shopfronts, their own sullen lip-syncing clips and their own fake-eyelash experiments beamed to strangers across the globe. 

The fact is that childhood as a category was too fragile to withstand the totalizing force of social media. In-built features like the gatekeeping and chastisement of parents, the creativity of boredom, the privacy of loneliness, were traded in for intoxicating external moral codes, constant stimulation and the paranoia of exposure as soon as social media companies established Instagram, YouTube and TikTok as essential presences in young lives. The difficult tween years are periods of excruciating fashion experimentation (in my case, those undocumented crimes involved lace-fringed leggings) and rolling identity crisis: phase after phase, bad outfit after criminally bad outfit. The braces, swoopy side fringes and crippling self-consciousness of those years are formative; to develop personality and resilience, you need privacy. And yet, privacy is no longer an option. Kim Kardashian said of North’s occasional faux pas: “Unfortunately, we made that mistake in front of the whole world.” But really, today, who doesn’t?

North West, Aged 12 and ¾, is treating official album releases like most of us used cringe diary entries that should never see the light of day — but then so are all Gen Alphas, who use TikToks to broadcast to their albeit smaller followings their own middle-school malaise. All this expression jeopardizes the authenticity of feelings and opinions: for many online children today, all private thoughts are subconsciously optioned for public posts, which must result in a strange new self-fashioning. Always mindful of an imagined audience, children’s emotional lives mirror the viral feelings of others. Just as North West sings of “every scar, all the blood”, her “shady” entourage or the loneliness of that Lambo in imitation of her goth faves and her grimmo father, preteens the world over simulate the views and feelings of others. Like North, they perform angst without the required depth of introspection or experience; it’s just cool to do. 

As a great imitator, Miss Westie is a herald for Gen Alpha’s ascent to the public sphere. When her generation becomes the culture-shaping twentysomethings, we should brace for a wave of hollow authenticity: these children are relentlessly expressive mimics trained from infancy to perfect public image. A cohort of copycats. 

North represents the near-universal condition of modern youth: she is what childhood looks like when buffers against the adult world disappear; when that separate sphere of shielded development dissolves. Personally, I like her. The choices she makes — her odd fashion sense, her musical homages to passing obsessions — remind me very much of being her age. She is bizarre and fascinating, and living the girlhood dream. But if you think she is overexposed, thin on talent and fatally overconfident then brace yourself — a whole generation of Norths is ready to rush the stage.

Easy — but inaccurate. 

Cultural life in the 21st century doesn’t feel tortured or ecstatic so much as muted. We aren’t truly bored anymore; boredom has been technologically abolished. Every stray second can be plastered over with a feed, a notification, a video “For You,” an algorithmic recommendation tuned precisely to prevent mental calm. But neither are we animated. There are widespread predictions of a coming civil war and calls for a political uprising, yet neither is remotely on the horizon — because we aren’t passionate enough. Instead, we drift in a gray zone between stimulation and stupor, provoked but under-engaged, surrounded by infinite novelty that no longer feels all that novel.

Our clothes arrive in two days and fall apart in three. Travel is cheaper, but cities blur into one another, interchangeable landscapes of chain restaurants, and “authentically curated” coffee shops identical from Denver to Dublin. The internet, once a wild frontier, now feels like a series of endlessly recycled aesthetics: girl dinner, cottagecore, blokecore, everything a core, everything a remix. 

It’s precisely this sense of living in a stagnant wasteland that Blank Space, W. David Marx’s wide-ranging survey of 21st century-culture, tries to map. In his previous polemic, 2022’s Status and Culture, the Tokyo-based culture-vulture took a sanguine approach to contemporary life, arguing that the omnivorous approach to cultural consumption in the West — where there is no more snobbery, and where elites enjoy “not just high culture, but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and sophisticated” — is by and large a good thing for the sake of flattening the class distinctions of old. We were slouching toward equality. 

Now, Marx worries that the lack of pretense in contemporary culture is no utopia, that it might mean we’re all eating from the same trough of slop. Across nearly 400 increasingly exasperated pages, Marx convincingly argues that art, entertainment, and fashion since the year 2000 have been some combination of uninspired, recycled, soulless, corporatized, or plainly dumb — so much so that there is a blank space where a distinct cultural imprint should be. 

The book draws its title from the Taylor Swift song, but it should have been called Bad Space, because what Marx charts isn’t a lack of distinct cultural production, but a disposable, amoral culture led by “charlatans and reprobates,” as he puts it. “With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence, culture became a lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.” I’d go further, and argue that 21st-century culture is a product of the rise of a post-moral society, a civilization that lost its backbone, where shame, seriousness, and shared judgment have been replaced by nihilism, vanity, and greed. 

Marx would rather tell you that the hellscape of the present is due to the abandonment by the creative class of the 1960s counterculture that spurred cultural innovation to new heights. “Artists reshaped the established symbolic core, tweaking human consciousness to reveal new ways to perceive the world,” he wrote, which led to “new styles, new goods, and new behaviors.” But in his telling, the pure artistic invention of the late 20th century was suffocated to death by — yes — neoliberalism, that inscrutable yet omnipotent bogey of Left liberals.

To make his point, Marx praises Pearl Jam’s modest refusal to sell out in the 1990s and compares it favorably to the Mount Rushmore of 21st-century cultural derailment: Kanye West, whose career has the dramatic arc of a Greek tragedy rewritten by TMZ; who first made his mark with the gospel-inflected single “Jesus Walks” and barely 20 years later wrote a rap ode in honor of Adolf Hitler. The book also traces the inglorious rise of proto-influencers Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton and a trio of sleazeballs: pervy fashion photographer Terry Richardson, Vice editor-turned-Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, and Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild, whose contribution to American culture is … well, exactly what you think it is. What ties these figures together, in Marx’s telling, is that they exemplify a society with no values left but market values.

Blank Space performs rhetorical parkour to avoid blaming liberals or progressives for any of it, instead dutifully blaming 21st-century cultural decay on conservatives. He’s half right when he gestures toward economics and wields phrases like “neoliberalism,” “late capitalism,” and “market incentives.” And he isn’t wrong to invoke the late Fredric Jameson, whose famous line from Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism could serve as Blank Space’s thesis statement: “Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally,” creating a frantic churn of “ever more novel-seeming goods” and obliterating the distinction between art and packaging. But the process described by Jameson is not simply the result of capitalism’s strength, but society’s weakening. Once the belief in non-market values collapses, culture becomes indistinguishable from advertising.

Marx argues for the revival of old norms, but he overlooks who was largely responsible for their demise in the first place. For most of the 20th century, flouting norms was a New Left pastime — from the counterculture to punk, queer avant-gardes, and the art world. The point was to Question Authority, mock propriety, scandalize the bourgeoisie, and liberate the individual. And they won. So decisively, in fact, that by the aughts, the bourgeois values were simply … gone. Outside of new social taboos created by the race-and-gender-obsessed professional-managerial classes, there was nothing left to rebel against. By rejecting moral language in the name of liberation, the Left ceded moral authority to the market, argues Ana María Cisneros in Damage Magazine. “We surrendered to the only morality the market recognizes: preference and purchase.”

The rot of the post-moral society goes beyond soulless or mediocre entertainment products. We may be in the midst of a mass amnesia event. In her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs — a patron saint of liberals — treated cultural collapse as a social and institutional problem. The existence of big cultural industries — newspapers, TV, and the internet — obscured the fact that we were on the brink of a neo-Dark Age, a term that, whatever its historical accuracy, aptly describes periods of cultural stagnation and mass-forgetting. Jacobs recognized that, in the West, we were losing family stability, real education, civic responsibility, and cultural memory, and that it was leading to the erosion of the institutions that reproduce the collective customs, practices, and rituals of the past. 

The cultural byproduct of Dark Ages, Jacobs wrote, wasn’t empty. “It is not a blank; much is added to fill the vacuum. But the additions break from the past, and themselves reinforce a loss of the past.” Yet Marx makes the case that if we’re in a Dark Age, it’s because our artists are now conservative and lack a “genuine countercultural ethos.” Indeed, Blank Space makes the absurd claim that the early-aughts hipster era — the American Apparel, Vice, Williamsburg, Terry Richardson, “indie-sleaze” years — was Patient Zero of the new conservative culture. 

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His evidence is that the early-aughts hipster scene was snarky, cynical, and displayed a kind of libertine hedonism lacking utopian imagination, prefiguring the amoral MAGA-friendly art scene of post-Covid lower Manhattan (explored by UnHerd columnist Matt Gasda in his era-capturing play Dimes Square). Sure. But that makes the early aughts post-political, not conservative. Contra Marx, the hipster moment didn’t pave the way for Dimes Square conservatism, with its ironic trolling. Rather, hipsterism was a product of the vacuum of discernment and tradition created by anti-social libertarianism of both Left- and Right-wing varieties. And into that vacuum waddled the MAGA Right.

One has to read between the lines to realize that Blank Space is not just a cultural history, but an accidental sociology of a profoundly atomized society. 

Marx’s argument that the market colonized culture overlooks the fact that culture collapsed alongside society, and that this collapse was accelerated by technology. We now live in “the anti-social century,” as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has argued: the moment when digital technology accelerated our retreat into hyper-individualized isolation. Concerts, clubs, civic centers, hangouts, bars, and churches withered, and Americans now spend less time with friends, neighbors, and communities than at any point in modern history. Bowling Alone led to scrolling alone. The result is the erasure of the social fabric that once made innovative culture possible.

Culture requires communities with shared expectations, peer pressure, reputational consequences, scenes, mentors, and traditions. Remove those, and all that’s left is audience metrics and the conditions of a new Dark Age. Blank Space recognizes this reality in some sense and calls for a renaissance. Marx wants artists to RETVRN to the 20th century and bring back creative ambition, and, likewise, for critics to rediscover discriminating taste, audiences to rediscover seriousness, and creative enclaves to redefine norms — something like Make America Creative Again. It’s accidentally the best conservative book of the year.

The face, and the body, she has now is very different from the one she had when we knew her as Jordan. In her first Page 3 appearance in 1996, she was 18, fresh-faced and natural-breasted. Today, her breasts are enormous architectural domes constructed over 17 operations (her last was a slight reduction after a 2022 procedure gave her the “biggest breasts in Britain”). After facelifts, fillers, nosejobs, Botox and veneers, her face has long crossed the line from “enhanced” to “done” to, now, an alien kind of hardness.

She has been called a plastic surgery “victim”. But Price sees it differently. She has made the choice to look “fake”. “Why do you think I spent all that money on it?” she asked in one of her autobiographies. “That’s how I want to look!”

Pre-surgeries, she was a perfectly attractive girl. But she was only a perfectly attractive girl, and the supply of those outstripped demand so much that (according to Price) in her early days of Page 3 modelling, her take-home from a photoshoot after agent’s fees and travel was just £30. It was only after she had her first set of implants that she began to be something exceptional. As she wrote: “I finally got the boobs I wanted and they brought me a great deal of work and made me famous, so respect to the boobs!”

Price’s profession was model. But her career was really in something different: she’s a body entrepreneur. She understood herself as an object, and she understood that the value of that object consisted in pushing it to its most extreme form. It was not beauty that she offered. It was shock. Her gigantic breasts were not a promise of fertility or an exaggeration of youthful perkiness. They announced exactly how much Price was willing to undergo in the service of making herself attractive to men — a willingness to undergo a gratifying level of pain and inconvenience.

The sharp edges of her implants declared her submission, and her submission secured her elevation. Page 3 girls almost never became stars in America: the concept didn’t translate. But Price was put on the US cover of Playboy and labelled “London’s legendary bad girl”. She also caught the eye of the century’s sharpest student of celebrity. In 2009, a starstruck Kim Kardashian tweeted: “Omg Katie Price aka Jordan and her husband Peter [Andre] are on my flight home from NYC!”

It’s easy to see how Kardashian — then barely two years into a reality TV career — could see a media role model in Price, who had been packaging her life as television content since 2002. But what Kardashian learned from Price’s body is probably just as important. Like Price, Kardashian made her fortune from one wildly exaggerated body part, though in Kardashian’s case it was her butt rather than her breasts, and according to Kardashian no surgical intervention was required.

Nonetheless, Kardashian’s public embrace of “waist training” (severe corsetry) and restrictive diets (the drastic slim down necessary to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the Met Gala, for example) encouraged scrutiny of her body, and that scrutiny encouraged speculation about what more radical procedures were allegedly involved; and that, in turn ensured her place in the public view. How she looked was fascinating, but the question of what she might have done to look that way was even more so.

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Price’s embrace of the body as business was prescient. Her path to celebrity was one that would be in many regards followed by the woman who became the most famous person alive. And although Price was formed in the now-redundant print economy of Page 3 and lad mags, her attitude was right for the arrival of social media self-commodification. Filters and Facetune made it normal to reshape your image. Price was simply earlier in going one step further and reshaping herself to become the image.

All that matters for the consummate object is what shows up on screen. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is the last refuge of red-blooded heterosexuality in print now that Playboy has shut down, but over the last few years it has been keen to show inclusivity in its objectification: in 2023, its cover stars included the trans woman Kim Petras, and 81-year-old Martha Stewart. That both could be represented as desirable might be seen as a win — neither age nor birth sex can stop you from being sexy!

But there’s also an implied threat. If it’s possible to be this hot while being male or old, what’s stopping every other woman from achieving perfect body status? What parts of your personhood, or even which bodily organs, are you stubbornly holding onto at the expense of becoming the ideal image? You, too, could have a body like this. All you have to do is let go of the idea that your body exists for anything other than to be looked at.

The problem for the body entrepreneur is that she has to keep changing. Jodie Marsh — Price’s Page 3 peer and rival for the “biggest implants” title — reinvented herself in 2011 as a bodybuilder, boasting that she had dropped four dress sizes in seven weeks. The pictures of her, chestnut-tanned and flexing her ripped muscles, ensured a round of publicity for her at a time when she was in her mid-thirties and in danger of ageing out of sexiness by lad mag standards (which were themselves sinking towards redundancy).

But Marsh couldn’t keep pace with Price’s sheer commitment to transformation. (Today, Marsh has taken the Bardot option in post-sexiness: she runs an animal sanctuary.) The question for Price is whether her body is still able to serve her needs. Her willingness to remould herself sustained her when the fashion for supersize implants waned: as the natural look was revived, the sheer bizarreness of her look ensured interest even while other women were opting to have their implants removed. As the old soft porn income streams (magazines, calendars) dwindled, Price remained compelling enough to move into new markets such as Only Fans. Here, she could make the relationship between body modification and her commercial viability even more explicit: she offered a deal to fans whereby those who contributed to her boob job fund got a first look at the results. And, she promised, “The bigger the contribution, the more of my new boobs you will see.” Horrific? Absolutely. Desperate? Transparently. But also honest about the bargain she has always made. Her body is a resource, and she made her living by treating it not as a living thing but as matter to be chopped up and remade for other people’s paid pleasure.

It is possible and even profitable to treat yourself as an asset. It is, though, not sustainable. The surgically crafted body is less an ideal of the flesh than an ideal of mastery over the flesh. But it is a hollow ideal, because eventually the physical will prevail. Price has suffered from scarring, ruptures and infections in the pursuit of remaining the perfect object — and her financial woes suggest that project is coming to the end of its term. The body entrepreneur pushes herself harder than anyone else, but that only means she learns the same lesson as everyone else sooner: there is nothing but the body, and when the body is exhausted, there is no you.

For this we may thank the existence of Butts: A Backstory, a new book by journalist Heather Radke. To be fair, it surely is not Radke’s intention to inculcate racial anxiety in her reader: Butts feels like a passion project, deeply researched and fun to read, offering a deep dive into the history and culture of the human rear end, from the Venus Callipyge (from whose name the word “callipygian” is derived) to Buns of Steel to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s seminal rap celebrating all things gluteal. It is a topic ripe for well-rounded analysis, so to speak. But having been written in the very particular milieu of 2020s America, Butts unfortunately falls victim to the contemporary vogue for viewing all matters of culture through a racial lens. The result is a work that not only flattens the butt, figuratively, but makes the book feel ultimately less like an anthropological study and more like an entry into the crowded genre of works which serve to stoke the white liberal guilt of the NPR tote bag set.

The concept of cultural appropriation has always struck me as both fundamentally misguided and historically illiterate, arising from a studied incuriosity about both the inherent contagiousness of culture and the mimetic nature of human beings. But when it comes to the remixing of thing such as textiles, hairdos or fashion trends across cultures, the appropriation complaints seem at least understandable, if not persuasive: there’s a conscious element there, a choice to take what looked interesting on someone else and adorn your own body in the same way. Here, though, the appropriated item is literally a body part — the size and shape of which we rather notoriously have no control over. And yet Radke employs more or less the same argument to stigmatise the appropriation of butts as is often made about dreadlocks or bindis.

The book is insistent on this front: butts are a black thing, and liking them is a black male thing, and the appreciation of butts by non-black folks represents a moral error: cultural theft or stolen valour or some potent mix of the two. Among the scholars and experts quoted by Radke on this front is one who asserts that the contemporary appreciation of butts by the wider male population is “coming from Black male desire. Straight-up, point-blank. It’s only through Black males and their gaze that white men are starting to take notice”. To paraphrase a popular meme: “Fellas, is it racist to like butts?”

Perhaps needless to say, a wealth of cultural artefacts — from the aforementioned Venus sculpture to the works of Peter Paul Rubens to certain showtunes of the Seventies —  belie the notion that white guys were oblivious to the existence of butts until black men made it cool to notice them. But the cultural legacy of the butt is undeniably entangled with the legacy of racism and eugenics, including a sordid and repellent history wherein certain anthropologists of the white male variety both fetishised the physiques of black women with ample backsides and conflated their peculiarities with savagery and promiscuity.

Most prominent in this history is the case of Sarah Baartman, to whom Radke devotes an entire chapter plus countless references: Baartman was a member of the Khoekhoe tribe in South Africa, who in the early 1800s was coerced into travelling to Europe and participating in a freak show-style exhibition in which onlookers gawked at — and sometimes poked or grabbed — her buttocks. If Baartman’s feelings about this remain somewhat mysterious (the records of the time are ambiguous as to how voluntary her participation was), the motivations of the men who trafficked her are less so: anthropologists of the time were obsessed with categorising humans into a racial hierarchy. It wasn’t just Baartman’s butt that fascinated them but her entire body, including the shape of her skull and her elongated labia, which were held up as evidence that she (and hence all black women) were a lower order of human being.

Certainly, it is impossible to do justice to the history of butts without devoting ample space to Baartman. But it’s one thing to give due scrutiny to the fact that some 19th century anthropologists indulged in the repugnant racial stereotyping of black women’s bodies and body parts; it’s another to replicate it ourselves — or to assume that other people are.

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Radke does assume, though — repeatedly, persistently, and sometimes in spite of alternative theories or evidence to the contrary. This includes advancing the argument that bustles, the Victorian-era fashion that trended more than 50 years after Sarah Baartman’s death, were inspired by her singular figure — and that white women were coyly, perhaps even consciously, appropriating Baartman’s silhouette in an act of racist fetishisation. Notably, Radke is the first to acknowledge the obvious flaw in her argument: “There is also a question of why a late-19th-century woman would have wanted to look like Sarah Baartman, whose silhouette had been used as the quintessential example of African as subhuman,” she writes. Why, indeed? But Radke answers this question with some crude stereotyping of her own: “White culture and fashion have both proved relentlessly adept at cherry-picking throughout the centuries, finding a way to poach the parts of other people’s culture, histories, and bodies that suit them and leave behind the rest.”

Why would 19th century women have aspired to the silhouette of a sexually promiscuous savage? Because they were a bunch of Karens, that’s why (and here the self-loathing contemporary white woman reader is surely nodding along).

By the time Butts comes around to analysing the contemporary derriere discourse, its conclusions are all but foregone: the political is not just personal, but anatomical. The book calls multiple women, including Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Miley Cyrus, to account for their appropriation of butts, which are understood to belong metaphorically if not literally to black women. The most scathing critique is directed at the then-21-year-old Cyrus, whose twerking at the VMAs is described as “adopting and exploiting a form of dance that had long been popular in poor and working-class Black communities and simultaneously playing into the stereotype of the hypersexual Black woman”. The mainstreaming of butts as a thing to be admired, then, is the ultimate act of Columbusing: “The butt had always been there, even if white people failed to notice for decades.”

There is also the curious wrinkle in Radke’s section on the history of twerking, which credits its popularisation to a male drag queen named Big Freedia. The implicit suggestion is that this movement style is less offensive when performed by a man dressed as a woman than by a white woman with a tiny butt.

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Butts doesn’t claim to be a story with a moral, but one nevertheless emerges: everyone may have a butt, but butts are not for everyone. And it is worth noting that however much baggage it assigns the white men who like butts, its implications are even more fraught for the white women to whom the butts are attached. One gets the sense that non-black women are not supposed to have big butts — that those who do have accomplished something unnatural if not outright suspicious. And if you insist on having a butt (and, really, do you have to?), then you must under no circumstances be proud of it, or accept positive attention for it, or — heaven forfend — make it part of your brand.

Ironically, the author of this book is herself a white woman with a large backside, a fact of which she periodically reminds the reader. And yet, Butts thoroughly subsumes its subject matter into the cultural appropriation discourse in a way that implicitly impugns all the non-black women who look — at least from behind — a hell of a lot more like Nicki Minaj than Kate Moss, women who perhaps hoped that their own big butts might be counted among those Sir Mix-a-Lot cannot lie about liking. It is worth noting, too, that the women hung out to dry by this argument are the same ones who other progressive identitarian rhetoric almost invariably fails to account for: the more it indulges in the archetype of the assless willowy white woman, the more Butts excludes from its imagination the poor and working class — whose butts, along with everything else, tend to be bigger. It fails to account, too, for those from ethnic backgrounds where a bigger butt — or, as one of my Jewish great-grandmothers might have said, a nice round tuchus — is the norm.

All told, Butts offers an interesting if somewhat monomaniacal look back at the cultural history of the derriere. But as for how to view our backsides moving forward — especially if you happen to be a woman in possession of a big butt yourself — the book finds itself at something of a loss. Those in search of body positivity will not find it here; Radke is firm on this front, that white women who embrace their big butts are guilty of what Toni Morrison called “playing in the dark”, dabbling thoughtlessly with a culture, an aesthetic, a physique that doesn’t really belong to them. The best these women can hope for, it seems, is to look at their bodies the way Radke does in the final pages, with a sort of resigned acceptance: her butt, she says, is “just a fact”. On the one hand, this is better than explicitly instructing women to feel ashamed of their bodies (although implicitly, one gets the sense that shame is preferable to the confident, twerking alternative). But after some 200 pages of narrative about the political, sexual, cultural, historical baggage with which the butt is laden, it feels a bit empty, a bit like a cop-out. It could even be said — not by me, but by someone — that Butts has a hole in it.

Both these competing visions of beauty have one thing in common: they are the result of many decades of the self’s extreme commodification. In other words, both are evidence of the fact that we have fundamentally lost our ability to see real beauty.

An intuitive sense of beauty should transcend trends. But our understanding of it fluctuates wildly. Just look at how the ideal woman’s body has varied in the last few decades: the fetishisation of heroin chic was en vogue in the Nineties, only to be replaced by the curvy Kardashianism of the early-2000s. Only in the last week, Kim herself has made headlines for having lost 10 kilos and “her signature curves” — heralding an era in which skinny is back.

This oscillation is the sign of a culture that has lost touch with the eternal. In its place, culture is now ruled by the narcissism of the individual — who, as Fromm put it, now “experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions”. The impact on interpersonal relationships has been drastic, and terrible. Fromm argued that one has to transcend one’s narcissism in order to see beauty in another, and so experience love — but society now precludes such transcendence, by seeing meaning-making as purely a question of economics. Community has broken down, and so we are forced to find meaning through marketing ourselves to the highest bidder.

The result is not beauty, but ugliness. Consider the marketed self that dominates social media: an exaggeration of sexual attractiveness which has, with the help of the beauty-industrial complex, become grotesque. Female bodies are made to appear hyper-fertile through Botox and butt lifts, and male bodies virile through calf implants or tummy tucks. A recent GQ article highlighted a man who spent $75,000 to have both of his femurs broken and his legs extended to increase his height by a few inches. “I noticed that taller people just seem to have it easier,” he said.

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Such comments hint at how ideas of beauty influence intimate relationships. In dating algorithm swipe culture, taller men get more engagement. So, instead of removing himself from a market in which his body lowers his chances of finding a date, this man chooses to alter his body to game the system.

As for women, almost every form of cosmetic surgery has been on the rise since the pandemic, including Botox, lip fillers, and nose reshaping. When we were forced into becoming avatars of our real lives, in both professional and personal settings, we increasingly saw ourselves as the image we projected. It inspired many to alter their bodies in ways that look good on screen but horrifying in person. Instead of resisting the urge to flatten our existence to how we appear on Zoom, we altered that appearance so that our avatars look younger and similar.

This is one form of ugliness: radically manipulating the appearance of the self in order to satisfy our sense of what beauty is. But there is another prevalent form, which is based on radically altering any shared sense of what beauty is — by declaring it to be a form of patriarchal oppression. This form is epitomised by the fat acceptance movement.

At their most extreme, fat-acceptance activists claim that health standards, let alone beauty standards, are a social construct that must be overthrown. The “health at every size” mantra of The Association for Size Diversity and Health is, in some ways, an understandable response to sometimes extreme pressures to be thin. But it goes even further,  completely detaching health from weight, despite strong evidence the two are fundamentally linked. Elsewhere, this group forgets that a plus-size model posing in a tiny bikini (inevitably sent by a sponsor) is simply an individual commodifying her appearance to gain status. Unlike other models, this status comes from playing the victim: fat activists often suggest that equating weight with health is discrimination or an affront to their disability.

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True and transcendent beauty, though, is not to be found in either status game: it lies neither in exaggerated sexualisation nor exaggerated victimhood. Quite the contrary: beauty depends on the eschewal of narcissism, and the practice of outward virtue within an interdependent community. Today, however, this is no longer possible.

The upshot is that we have begun to see ourselves as standardised products, to be compared across an image-saturated marketplace. This view is apparent in the statement ubiquitous on TikTok: “He/she is a 10, but…” By reducing appearance to a crude number, our sensual experience of someone’s being is reduced to the visual — it is completely flattened. We are losing, to use Ivan Illich’s phrase, “sensual praxis”: a way of living that appreciates the full extent we are able to experience the world.

Illich asked, “What can I do to survive in the midst of the show?”, before answering his own question with a proposed two-fold approach. First, he calls for “an ethics of vision”, which calls for us to “protect” our “imagination from overwhelming distraction, possibly leading to addiction”. Second, he suggests “ocular askesis”, a discipline by which we train ourselves to perceive the world as we wish to see it. Illich scholar L.M. Sacasas goes further: “Our task, then, would be to cultivate an ethos of seeing or new habits of vision ordered toward the good. And, while the focus here has fallen on sight, Illich knew and we should remember, that all the senses can be likewise trained.”

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Fromm says something similar about love, which, he argues, “isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.” Love, like beauty, has been decoupled both from the context of interdependence and the wholeness of embodied experience. The decoupling has left us with a crisis of intimacy: even as we reveal more intimate details about ourselves on social media, we are losing our ability to be close to others in real life.

The commodification of beauty is at the heart of this crisis. Fromm argues that “the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle underlying love are incompatible”. But we can overcome the idea that we are only beautiful if we can be marketed in specific, narrow realms. We can choose not to rate each other with numbers, or indulge the swipe culture of dating apps. Training ourselves to see the transcendent beauty of virtue is a way to open ourselves up to the expanse of human experience, to hone our “sensual praxis”, to restore our ability to be interdependent again, and to love.

The series arrives as Kanye is in the thick of one of the more excruciatingly public divorces of recent times, his Instagram feed a bilious froth of resentment towards Kim Kardashian and her new boyfriend Pete Davidson. He also recently took against Billie Eilish for showing concern for crowd safety, which he somehow interpreted as a dig at his friend Travis Scott.

There’s more where that came from. West’s public life has become an endlessly dispiriting spectacle at the same time as his records have become increasingly hard to love. While he continues to throw giant listening parties for them, and will be headlining this year’s Coachella festival under his new legal name, Ye, his music now “sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat”, as Pitchfork put it. All in all, it’s not the ideal time for four-and-half-hours of television dedicated to his genius, but that is precisely what makes jeen-yuhs so compelling.

The origins of the documentary are suitably complicated. In 2002, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons jacked in his career as a stand-up comedian and television host in Chicago to move to New York and chronicle the rise of a fascinating new 24-year-old rapper-producer that he had first met four years earlier. Coodie was there for two years, sometimes with co-director Chike Ozah, up to the release of West’s sensational debut album The College Dropout in February 2004.

Had it come out in 2005, the documentary would have charted the birth of a superstar, but West blocked it. “Kanye said he wasn’t ready for world to see the real him,” Coodie explains in his genial voiceover. “He told me he was acting now — playing a role.” Gradually, Coodie was frozen out. The two men didn’t see each other at all between 2007 and 2014 and filming resumed in earnest only in 2019, making the third episode of jeen-yuhs a bizarre and messy coda. To cap it off, Kanye demanded (but did not receive) final approval, so the series has been released without his blessing.

It would be difficult to make a conventional biopic about Kanye because the narrative arc doesn’t land. The classic pop star story goes something like this: ambition, achievement, crisis, recovery, redemption. That redemption might have happened for West with 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs was such an aggressive breach of celebrity etiquette that even President Obama called him a “jackass”. (It’s remarkable to think that Joe Biden is the first 21^st-century US president not to have expressed a strong opinion about Kanye West.)

The rapper weathered the almighty backlash by hunkering down in Hawaii with three studios full of collaborators working 24/7 on an operatic magnum opus. “It’s never explicitly discussed, but everyone here knows that good music is the key to Kanye’s redemption,” wrote one journalist who covered the sessions. “With the right songs and the right album, he can overcome any and all controversy, and we are here to contribute, challenge and inspire.” There is, however, a big difference between vindication and redemption. West learned that if his music was good enough he could get away with anything — so what happens now that it’s not?

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West is both the most significant and the most polarising artist of his era. Significant because he made hip hop so huge and omnivorous that the beats-and-rhymes model depicted in the 2002 footage now appears parochial. In 2012, the Atlantic described him as “the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music”. Polarising because he touted his wares with a manic grandiloquence that raised the bar for rap braggadocio. “For some kids right now, I am what Michael Jackson was for me,” he once said, as if Jackson weren’t the crowning example of a sweet, supernaturally talented kid who became destroyed and dehumanised by fame.

I’ve met West on two occasions. The first time was in Los Angeles in 2005, when he was launching his second album, Late Registration. Playfully bombastic, he framed his legendary arrogance as a form of entertainment in its own right: “It’s like I’m walking on this tightrope. It’s like the reason why you go to a circus — it’s more entertaining. It’s like, damn, what if he falls? And if I do make it, it’s like, damn, he made it! But either way you’re saying damn. Everybody else is just walking on the ground.”

The second time was in London, a decade later, between the cyborg roar of Yeezus and the colourful melee of The Life of Pablo. I remember thinking that I’d never met a less relaxed person in my life. He told me he was “extremely fucking happy”, but the only time he smiled was when his mother-in-law Kris Jenner walked into the room with his daughter North. Otherwise, it was like talking to a balled fist.

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You didn’t need to see him up close to witness this hardening and shuttering. Many of the College Dropout songs we see him recording in jeen-yuhs (‘We Don’t Care’, ‘All Falls Down’) are interested in other people, situating West in the broader community of we. He became much less, well, collegiate over the next few years. Even when his albums were as vast and populous as imperial palaces, they had an air of claustrophobia and loneliness, with more mirrors than windows. Paranoia is a species of narcissism after all. On stage, too, he conveyed a terrible solitude. No Glastonbury headliner has ever shown less interest in bonding with the crowd than he did in 2015. We were there to witness a moment, not to share it.

A year later, West experienced a breakdown which led to hospitalisation and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This partially (but only partially) explains the most chaotic episode in the history of pop stars venturing into politics. It began when he celebrated Donald Trump’s victory during a concert, triggering a chorus of shocked boos. Later, he took to wearing a MAGA hat, posing for photo opportunities with Trump and saying that slavery was a choice: they just didn’t have enough gumption to be free. In 2020, he ran for president himself on a platform that sounded rather like theocracy. He won 60,000 votes.

Even before all this, West mocked his disappointed fans in the 2016 track ‘I Love Kanye’: “I miss the sweet Kanye, chop-up-the-beats Kanye.” Well, the good news is that there are three hours of that guy in jeen-yuhs: performing a daffy Stevie Wonder impression on the porch of his childhood home; gawping like a tourist at the lights of Times Square; giddy with delight when Jay-Z lets him rap a guest verse on ‘The Bounce’.

You can’t help rooting for him because everything was a struggle. He was a hot producer who wanted to be known as a great rapper and his neediness is heartbreakingly apparent. In one mortifying scene, he tries to impress a small boy by reeling off the names of hits he has produced. “Cool,” the kid says politely. A receptionist announces him as “Cayenne West”. Beside the suave virtuosity of Jay-Z or Mos Def, his rapping is tense and effortful, like he’s pushing a boulder up a hill.

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During this difficult period, he had no greater cheerleader than his mother, Dr Donda C. West. He’s talked about Donda often (and named two albums after her) but it’s something else to see her in the documentary, the quintessence of maternal pride, and to observe how boyishly humble he is in her company. “This is so exciting isn’t it? I love it!” she says with a brilliant grin. “Anybody that does something that much and that long and is that good, it’s gotta pay off”. Her death during cosmetic surgery in November 2007 is the decisive rupture in West’s life: the start of the chaos years. In 2015, I asked him what he had sacrificed for success and he didn’t hesitate: “My mom. If I had never moved to LA, she’d be alive”. He refused to elaborate, lest he start crying.

In the documentary, Donda offers caution along with her encouragement: “It’s important to remember that the giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”. Coodie runs with this metaphor, implying that West took it to heart, but he’s hardly an objective observer. His attempt to wrap up the story with gooey platitudes about God’s plan and friends reunited doesn’t square with what his camera captures, whether it’s a distressing bipolar episode or West delightedly viewing a clip of Tucker Carlson praising his anti-abortion position. The bridge that Coodie tries to jerry-rig back to 2002 collapses because he wasn’t there to document the transition from that Kanye to this one and unpick the rat king of grief, fame and mental illness that brought it about. The narrative doesn’t conclude; it just stops.

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Perhaps the problem is that West really does see nothing when he looks in the mirror, and what reads as preposterous self-confidence is really fathomless insecurity. In 2002, West had every reason to feel thwarted and undervalued, and to turn that frustration into rocket fuel, but that feeling never went away. Having conquered popular music, he had to find new areas in which to be misunderstood (fashion, politics) and new role models to emulate (Walt Disney, Picasso), the result being that he can never, ever be satisfied.

For a long time, that insatiability propelled his music to greater heights; now it distracts from it. Seeing the look on his face as he receives some kind words from Pharrell Williams or plays some tracks for Donda, you have to wonder if this period was as good as it got, before he realised that recognition wouldn’t bring happiness after all. Thus jeen-yuhs becomes a cautionary tale of ambition without end. The unique tragedy of Kanye West is not that he failed but that he could never allow himself to acknowledge that he’d won.

In one already-notorious image Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic representative for New York City, sports a gown that trailed multiple banners bearing the legend EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN. Maloney smiles, unmasked, at the camera. Behind her stand serried ranks of female serving staff, dressed in black and wearing identical black Covid masks.

In the earliest days of lockdown, this class-inflected freedom from hygiene theatre was the preserve only of the ultra-rich. While ordinary people were saying goodbye to dying relatives over Zoom, Kim Kardashian flew her entire feudal entourage to a private island for a birthday party.

A year on, those Met Gala images attest that hugging-as-privilege has now trickled down to the merely upper crust: regular celebrities, politicians, the founders of Black Lives Matter. But at the same time, those benefiting from the new elite right to in-person contact are pushing the opposite for everyone else: disembodiment as liberation.

This dream has been long in the making. We should greet it with all the enthusiasm we’d muster for a gift-wrapped bouquet of scorpions.

This is easier said than done. Pretty much everyone younger than I (born at the fag-end of the ‘70s) has grown up seeing themselves animate a CGI avatar on-screen, in any one of countless computer games — just as they’ve grown up conducting much of their social lives online.

If this is your normal, it’s not a big step to imagine a ‘self’ that has nothing to do with a physical body. This idea received big-budget cinematic treatment in the 2009 fantasy Avatar, featuring a crippled ex-soldier who gains a new life in a prosthetic body. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie was a smash hit, triggering such an outpouring of nerd emotion it spawned a new insult: ‘Avatards’.

But the dream of freeing human consciousness from the human body isn’t an internet-age invention. Back in the chaos of the first centuries AD, long before Christianity was codified into religious orthodoxy, esoteric sects and strange rites flourished. One such was the body of thought that came to be known as ‘Gnosticism’, from gnosis or ‘knowledge’. What survives of their thinking suggests that for Gnostics, the material world was intrinsically evil and the task of humanity was to escape it.

The early gnostics were scattered by heresy-hunters, but their dream of becoming beings of pure spirit lived on, famously via the Cathar sect in Southern Europe through the 12^th to 14^th centuries. The Catholic Church was not keen: in one notorious massacre at Béziers in 1209, the papal legate Arnaud Amaury is said to have told his men: “Kill them all — God will know his own.”

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Despite such persecution, the idea of liberating the human soul from squalid materiality persisted stubbornly underground. It survived in Rosicrucianism, which in turn made its way into strands of esoteric thinking that still flourish today in weird corners of the internet. But if esotericism is now largely the preserve of Very Online cranks, the Gnostic longing to become creatures of pure consciousness has gone supernova.

Early pioneers of the internet imagined ‘cyberspace’ as a place of liberation from all the pesky constraints of the material world. I remember thrilling at this ‘cyberpunk’ vision, as imagined by authors such as William Gibson in the 1990s. As Gibson depicted it, in ‘cyberspace’ a growing proportion of human life would be wholly unmoored from physical reality: an endlessly creative zone of gods, monsters and infinite possibility. In the recent words of cult sci-fi author Zero HP Lovecraft: “We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers”.

In this worldview, as for the crippled hero of Avatar, the imperfect nature of physical bodies is little more than a drag on self-actualisation. I’ve argued previously in these pages that this opinion helps power the increasingly radioactive debate about ‘gender identity’. But this is only one of the ways that what seemed in 2009 just a fantasy for nerds, is now mainstream politics and culture.

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Witness two new reality TV shows (or perhaps more accurately unreality TV shows) whose core premise is that selves can be separated from their bodies. Like The Voice, Fox’s new show Alter Ego showcases singing talent over physical hotness. But this comes with a twist: instead of singing from behind screens, Alter Ego performers will compete via CGI avatars.

This comes hot on the heels of Sexy Beasts, where contestants don elaborate prosthetic makeup before going on a blind date. The conceit is that by concealing their actual faces, their true selves will be better able to shine through.

The common factor behind both these shows is the idea that by working a human ‘self’ loose from its embodied presence in a physical body, provides ever greater freedom to be our ‘true selves’. In a promo video for Alter Ego, one of the singers explains his desire to perform via alter ego: “There’s something about how I look behind this alter ego,” he says, “that I feel like it’s held me back”.

In 2018, Aaron Bastani promised that automation would create a world of super-abundance for everyone, leading to a socialist horn of plenty and liberation from work via ‘fully automated luxury communism’. Today, that’s morphing into a dream of emancipation not just from work, but from our very bodies: fully automated luxury Gnosticism.

But this dream has a sting in the tail. For many adolescent girls now, what holds them back isn’t their bodies but the impossibility of living up to the image they project online. Reports are emerging of teenagers so dependent on tweaking their selfies with Instagram ‘filters’ they become unable to interact with people in person.

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Even Facebook’s own research now shows that life lived through too-perfect selfies is toxic for teenage girls. Meanwhile, for those whose jobs by definition can’t be unmoored from their bodies, the push for disembodied life has still more unsettling implications. Because no matter how loudly you promise that luxury Gnosticism will be fully automated, someone still has to take out the bins, stack the dishes and care for those who can’t care for themselves,

Their existence is a painful reminder that while Covid has accelerated the rise of the robots, even prompting the launch of a robot Covid nurse, we haven’t yet managed to automate blue-collar workers out of existence. Instead they’re increasingly downplayed: there’s a new presumption of mandatory, masked facelessness for the lowest-status people whose roles regrettably require them to show up to work in person. Lockdown’s abrupt reminder of how radically we depend on manual workers did not prompt a new appreciation of the working class.

Meanwhile, the middling strata — the so-called ‘Zoom classes’ — forms the key target audience for unreality TV shows that present virtual life as liberation. And for some, the shift to remote working has indeed been a net positive. For those with space for a home office, and families already formed, going virtual can be liberating — while there are still plenty of reasons to log off and focus on real life.

But for those who are single or less professionally established, the bleak reality of ‘remote work’ is less bucolic. This is the group for whom fully automated luxury Gnosticism offers the greatest temptation: when IRL life looks like sitting on your bed in a shared house, with an incipient case of laptop burn and one of the top 10 most popular girlfriend apps for companionship, why would you ever want to log off?

“I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia,” writes Zero HP Lovecraft, “and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be.” It’s tempting to imagine that Britain’s thus far more moderate approach to Covid restrictions — it feels like everyone has unmasked for autumn — will save us from such baroque extremes as we saw at the Met Gala. But we shouldn’t be over-confident: whether it’s quinoa or statue-smashing, what starts among the American elite has a habit of percolating out to the American imperial province that the United Kingdom now indisputably is.

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At the start of the pandemic, we imagined embodied, in-person human life might grow more valued as a result of the disruption. And indeed it has: but not for everyone. That endlessly creative world Gibson imagined is now romanticised and sold back to us by the people commissioning unreality TV. The right to remodel our ‘meat avatars’ is politicised as the new front for civil rights. The danger of taint by other physical bodies is a key public-health message. But how you experience fully automated luxury Gnosticism depends on where you sit in the class hierarchy.

At the bottom stand masked, anonymised servants, clad in face coverings and uniforms until they can be automated out of existence. In the middle sit the Zoom classes, for whom virtual life can be a perk or a nightmare. For the lucky ones, it’s a chance at family life, but for others it’s more like an endless, lonely shift as (in Zero HP Lovecraft’s bitter phrasing), “pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads”.

And even as tech and media elites sing the praises of luxury Gnosticism for the rest of us, they’re reserving unconstrained, in-person human interaction as a privilege for themselves. Whether this emerging political order comes dressed as civil rights, TV entertainment or public health, we should see it for what it is: an assault on the humanity of all but the aristocracy.

“Many this year want a pout like Sharon,” says Hoo, meaning Sharon Gaffka, the former beauty queen turned Department for Transport administrator who — despite having prominent work done to lips, face and breasts — failed to form a romantic connection with any of the men and was booted out of the villa last week.

Her failure to attract represents a painful Love Island irony: the correlation between surgery and attractiveness to men — and especially the ability to generate strong feelings — is weak. The less obviously enhanced women, from surfer-girl Lucie Donlan to winner Amber Rose in winter 2019, to Millie and Lucinda in this season, more often stoke an unambiguous, instant lust (they’re “fire”), while the women with more exaggerated features often struggle. Season Five’s Anna Vikali’s £100,000 of plastic surgery didn’t stop her from being summarily dumped when a better option came in, while Shaugna Phillips’ (Season Six) boldly artificial-looking mouth, eyes and nose did not keep Callum Jones from trading her in for a thinner, younger blonde at Casa Amor.

So why do women bother getting work done? Partly, of course, because it’s a fashion, disseminated at warp speed since the arrival of Instagram through the lucrative, Kardashian-inspired world of ultra-filtered influencers. That fashion has capitalised on a uniquely contemporary mixture of deep insecurity, and the politicisation of that insecurity: a defiant pride in “doing what makes you happy” and therefore doing what it takes to “pass, to survive and to thrive” — even if that means capitulating to one of patriarchy’s most devious regimes.

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The confused but angry politics of the new beauty burst to the surface in the first gripping set-piece of the current season of Love Island. The islanders were playing a game in which each person had to guess something about the person they were paired up with, to show how well they’d got to know them. The women’s cosmetic procedures were included in the game, with a frankness never seen before in the programme’s six-year history: one of the questions the men had to answer was what “work” their women had had done.

I’d have found such a question excruciatingly embarrassing, but then I belong to an outdated era in which one’s beauty is meant to look effortless — a fairly burdensome requirement in itself. By contrast, these women wrote with jolly loudness on their little blackboards what they’d all had done: all bar one (Kaz) had had something; a significant number had had Botox, filler and breast surgery. All of them were under the age of 27, and none of them seemed remotely coy about it.

A number of questions involved each party stating what they liked, or didn’t like, in a partner. Fan favourite Hugo, a 24-year old PE teacher with a club foot who has frequently been passed over for being “too nice”, used the word “fake” three times. He declared a strong dislike for “fakeness” or “anything fake” in women — personality and looks. It sounded like a fairly general word for a barrage of bad things in a society obsessed with authenticity, and no worse than what the other men claimed to revile, including women with visible arm hair. But after Hugo’s second invocation of “fake”, the heavily enhanced Faye growled: “that word keeps getting thrown around, doesn’t it?”

On the third time, Sharon and Faye exploded, calling Hugo “ignorant” and demanding he “get fucking educated” about why “girls get work done”. Hugo, oblivious, then burst into tears at the extreme consequences of his word choice, to which Faye responded, “I don’t give a fuck if he’s upset, he can fuck off”.

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It was clear now that “fake” had been taken as a slur word on a par with open racism — a comparison later made by a furious, filler-lipped Sharon, to the consternation of fans. Twitter duly exploded with “fake gate”, with former islanders — women who’d had work done — weighing in. Amber Rose agreed that the word had seemed pointed, while Laura Anderson, of Series Four, claimed that the women had “gone too far” in their reaction.

Faye explained her strong retort in telling terms:

“For me the word fake doesn’t go well. My mum and dad watched me cry every day from the age of 13 to 18 because I was underdeveloped, then they bought me a boob job for my 18^th birthday because I was having such a tough time.”

Getting work done was a reaction to body insecurity — a helpless, only-human female response to patriarchy. Sharon had also taken offence because “fake” insulted women who were driven to do it: “you don’t know the reasons why we’ve had stuff done and I think that’s really unfair”.  That she — that all the women on Love Island — had embraced and then benefitted hugely from the system she’s criticising was not acknowledged.

Fake-gate highlighted a new kind of feminist, then: a woman who sees her obsession with her own looks as both something justifiable and a sign of patriarchy-created vulnerability. This type of feminism has crystallised since social media allowed people, especially women, to get rich and famous from home-made self-portraits and videos — the more suggestive and exaggerated the better. The “fake” look condemned by Hugo is more likely to be seen on working-class women (the Love Island fan base is not generally middle class), but influencers’ use of some form of sexiness crosses class. This sexualised route to stardom doesn’t feel particularly feminist to someone schooled in, say, Women’s Liberation — but then, it can certainly be lucrative.

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And she may even recognise, like the women of Love Island, that she’s playing a game with rules set by patriarchy. Sissy Sheridan, a teen TikTok star with 5.3m followers — whose videos mainly show her pouting and lip-syncing in bikinis — believes her medium “is the most misogynistic platform ever,” replete with “slut-shaming and cyberbullying” of female stars. She condemns these slut-shamers as “haters,” proclaims to be a “feminist,” and continues to dance near-naked for her fans and rack up followers: one more example of how blurred the lines between feminism and sexualised self-selling have become.

Love Island’s fake-gate is another example, of course. But the row caught fire because the manipulation of our bodies has never been as explosive a political issue as in this era of trans rights and body positivity. In some circles, “natural” — one of the buzzwords of the body positivity movement — has become as political as “fake”. Right-on beauty observers like Sesali Bowen see the celebration of the “natural” as a judgement of those who manipulate their bodies because they are “marginalised”: trans people getting surgery to suit their true gender identities, say, or those hoping to escape pressures intensified by racism, ableism and lookism. Bowen also argues that plastic surgery is a democratising force that wrests “pretty privilege” from the hands of the few.

Perhaps she’s right. But the downsides of excessive bodily manipulation are painfully obvious. As well as signalling a moveable feast of insecurity and the tyranny of constant self-monitoring, fake-gate has highlighted how easily women can plunge from the envied and powerful into the pitied and reviled. This is part of a long-term female conundrum: how do we change our bodies enough to be beautiful but not too much to cloud our sexual allure? As Ben Jonson put it in a 1609 song, “Still to be neat, still to be dressed”, women should aim for a look of “sweet neglect”, which required being “powdered, still perfumed” — but subtly. Women who use too many additives are suspected of falseness (fakeness’s ancestor) and trickery. Robert Herrick, the 17^th century poet, railed at those who were: “False in legs, and false in thighs; / False in breast, teeth, hair and eyes”.

The potential for pitiable grotesquerie has always been waiting in the wings for women grasping too hungrily at perfect figures, faces and eternal youth. Today, we are inundated with stories of plastic surgery gone wrong; of monstrous transformations in which the attempt at beauty radically backfires. Testimonies by remorseful surgery addicts make eye-watering reading. Heidi Montag, an American reality star, has admitted to procedures all itemised in print: mini brow lift, forehead botox, nose job “revision”, fat injections in her cheeks, chin reduction, neck liposuction, pinned back ears, second breast job, liposuction on hips, waist and inner thighs, and buttock augmentation. “People have fewer scars from car accidents than I have on my body,” she observed.

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The hateful heart of Love Island

By Zoe Strimpel

Like Montag, the women of Love Island — and their millions of fans and followers — are caught up in a stressful, physically damaging game in which the potential payoff of fame is pitted against the brutal facts of time, human flesh, and fashion. And what are they playing for? The islanders throw everything into their appearance but seem flummoxed about how to actually talk to each other. In the end, the contestants find, no amount of paid-for, hard-won bodily perfection can fill the gap left by really “getting to know” someone — and liking them. When everyone has bodies on the tight spectrum of contemporary perfection, the ability to attract comes down to other things — in Love Island parlance, having “a bit about” you.

And the fashion may soon be turning sharply against enhancements — or “tweakments,” as they’ve called them this season. Ex-contestant Anna Vikali has just announced she is reversing her £100,000 of work, starting with a breast reduction, and Molly Mae Teague, runner up of winter 2019, has turned anti-“tweakment” after failing to recognise her own reflection in the mirror.

Still, the demand for surgical enhancement is continuing to rise, and the danger is that fakeness — understood in the surgical sense — becomes more seamlessly integrated into standard aesthetics, perhaps even morphing into the “natural”. After all, tweakments are now presented by their “feminist” purchasers as an only natural response to marginality, suffering and patriarchy. Like Faye and Sharon, they’ve cracked under the pressure to look a certain way, and surgery was their answer.

But forcing this unfortunate chain of events into a vocabulary of politicised victimhood conceals the seriousness of the motive, which is an obsessive focus on the body as the font of all worth. Recognising this helps us to see Botox, fillers, butt-lifts and boob jobs for what they really are — extreme, often counterproductive measures to fight time and nature — rather than acts of female bravura. They are short-term solutions, not only for individual women, but for women generally — who’d be much better off if the whole sexist system were dismantled, rather than propped up “fake” feminism.